The good colonel can bring the heat. I would be proud to carry his ruck from here to the goddamn Halls of Montezuma. So far I have been relatively pleased with the degree to which the voices of sanity - such as his - have drowned out the hysterical mewlings of the Pam Gellers and the Glenn Becks.

Chief,I roger your article , but some things are more than sitreps in combat.I accept the invalidity of reports at first glance. Also reality is seldom reflected in a official report, but that's not my point here.I think this article is an example of the military at it's very worst.The Bn Cdr is not a leader. He's a buffoon. No leader should ever call his men MF's or liars.This is utter bullshit and is not military. A faulty report due to inexperience, fear, lack of training or maturity IS NOT the same as lying.No wonder the troops fragged O's and Nco's.jim

jim: I dunno. My best CO CDR, Mad Mike Mattes, used to cuss us up one side and down the other (he was a mustang and never got over his tendency to use lots of adjectives when he got excited) when we all got likkered up at BN dining-ins. You can't tell me you didn't run into that. I can personally remember getting into a pissing match with my 1SG about some pointless bullshit at a Company social thing. Never crossed the line into disrespect but we went at it pretty hard. I suspect that this was the same thing; the Old Man slinging the shit with the young troops...

And the BN CDR wasn't telling the recon guys that their reports were lies - he was pointing out that if they INTERPRETED their observations for him they were doing the same thing as lying. And that's true; recon, like field reporters, needs to get out there and dig but send back just what they see, not what they THINK they see...

I should add that the thing about CPT Mattes was for all that he used to rip into us we also knew that he was hot shit in the field; fragging him would just have put the XO in charge, and THAT fucker was a dangerous idiot.

Anyway, I'd argue that all these news items really ARE just sitreps; snapshots of what the reporter can see. Think about it; how many times have the initial news stories been wrong? Your initial posts both at Milpub and RAW made the assumption (not illogical given the initial reports) that this was an AQ or AQ-affiliate operation and that it made some larger point about the "war on terror". If the recent information about the two guys involved being Chechens is true we may have to completely reassess that, or not. But I'll stand by Bateman's main point here; we do ourselves and each other a disservice when we take the immediate reports of anything as unchangeable fact.